Hostovsky consistently portrays his protagonists calling for, or thinking of, their mothers when they are about to die Thus in Dobrocinny vecirek, after he has murdered his lover

Anna and just prior to shooting himself, Julius hears in his mind his mother calling him from the window o f their childhood home and instructing him to return home and tell her everything. He imagines the air smells o f earth and longs to roll in grass, as though he is re-entering some primal, natural home. In Pûlnocnîpacient, when Malik collapses with a stroke, he calls out for his mother to come, and in Tfi noci, unaware that she is dying, Vëra reflects on how she has been missing her mother despite having had no fond memories o f her for years, and starts searching for her mother’s whereabouts.

Hostovsky was attempting to represent her as a Christian archetype. The fact that these women are often o f peasant, or at least old-fashioned, stock, indicates a mythopoeic representation o f female strength as perhaps the imcorrupted elemental force o f the nation’s roots (indeed Hostovsky is usually only interested in woman as a being o f superior understanding and sensitivity, as wisdom, in contrast to foolish male rationality, and in woman as the illusory object of man’s desire).

In his wartime work, Hostovsky’s advocacy o f representatives of uncorrupted nationhood gradually strengthens into a conservative anti- intellectualism. In contrast to the fainthearts o f the intelligentsia, peasant folk are the true Czechs on account o f the strength they exercise to protect life. In the letter ‘Kdyby mêla hlad a bylo ji zima’, which is addressed to a diplomat friend about to return to Czechoslovakia, the narrator requests that his friend find Olga, the narrator’s four-year-old daughter (who bears the name of Hostovsky’s real daughter), and take her back to his place o f birth. The narrator wishes for her to be cared for not by the rich, but by the poor, for they are ‘nasinci’ {LZV, p. 84). He recalls a tavern in the hills near the frontier where he and his friend fought off men from across the frontier who wished to dance with their womenfolk; the narrator describes this brawl not only as a defence of Olga’s mother, but also o f his native language, ‘Pro tu fee, pro tu fee, v které ma dcera pfed spanfm vzyva strâzného andelicka, v které jf babicka brouka ukoléba\ÿ, v které u nas zpivaji ptaci, sumf topoly, crci potoky a v které vetffk konejsl horké hlavy’ (p. 88). Again Hostovsky is mythopoeicizing: the language o f the lullabies crooned by his grandmother is also that o f nature, as

a

though human beings and the natural world were cdjoined in a mystical communion.

The quest for these virtues provides a frame for Listy z vyhnanstvi, as the collection opens with the narrator’s nostalgic evocation of home, ‘Zapomenuta pësinka’, and ends with a kind o f meditation, ‘Kdyby mêla hlad a bylo jf zima’, and a short story, ‘Zapisky’ (and, in particular, the conclusory paean), which attempt to ally true Czechness, Nature and a mythicized homeland: these three sections contain the lyricized prose which critics have alluded to. The frame, however, raises questions about the identity o f the narrator. On the one hand, although the collection is organized chronologically (so that even Bedfich

David’s notes begin in September 1940, after the date o f the preceding ‘letter’, 9 April 1940), one assumes that David is not the narrator o f the preceding letters for he has been in exile for three years and the narrator of the first ‘letter’ (dated 6 October 1939) appears not to have been in exile for more than a year (he declares that he cannot write now as he would have written a year ago). And yet the third, concluding, section of ‘Zapisky’ is indistinguishable in tone, other than in a more hyperbolic expression o f pathos, than the first letter. Given the fact that we suppose that there are two different narrators, one has the impression that Hostovsky cannot contain himself from (perhaps clumsily) overcoming the distance between author and narrator in an attempt to synthesize the concerns o f his work. It is within this narrow compass, if at all, that one may term his approach autobiographical.

The collection ends with an epiphany. The narrator has a vision of his wife, ‘the unfaithful one’, and she suddenly transforms into a thousand other women and children. Her plea for forgiveness prompts him to start kissing and embracing her, only to find himself suddenly kissing leaves and fondling moss as he awakes from his daydream. Hostovsky’s conclusory paean strongly echoes the sentiments and rhythms of Halas’s 1939 poème-en-prose ‘jâ se tam vrâtim’,^^ which begins with a robust liveliness and distijjs into a balladic sparseness as the narrator imagines a time when he will be able to return home:

Az jednou na velikém snemu ptacim v case mezi skfivankem a sovou bude jednohlasne pfistebetano jaro, jâ se tam vratim! Zatim vabim a chytam na vëjicky slov peknost toho vseho tam u nas, af se chytf, co se chyti. Ty mûj kraji, ty me bezpeci, ty ma zatvrzelosti, ty ma vëcnosti. Tvâ hlina, mnuta v prstech, voni po zetlelych vlasech davno pohfbenych tkalcovskych dëdû a bâb a je pnsadou me krve. Ty mûj kraji! (p. 35) Uz aby bylo po tom pekelcovani misty, kam nepatfim. [...] A f si jen zemë leti do prazdna, at’ si jen letl, jen kdyz zbude jistota jednoho mista, mista posledniho, mista jen pro hrob. Chci ho mit tam, jen tam u nas. Kdyby mi jen oci pro plac zbyly, jâ se tam vrâtim, jâ se tam i poslepu vrâtim. (p. 40)

Hostovsky’s narrator begins by invoking what we assume is a Czech homeland, ‘Ty, pro niz jméno vlast je slovo pfilis zvëtralé a jméno otcina je

29 D îlo Frantiska Halase, vol. 3: A co bâsnik, Prague, 1983; ‘jâ se tam vrâtim’ (1939), pp. 391-93. Halas himself dated the poem 1939, but there is speculation about whether it was possible for him to have written it at this stage; Halas’s son and the editors o f his Collected Works suggest that it could not have been written until the summer o f 1940.

slovo pfilis kruché’ {LZV, p. 155). The invocation unravels, however, into a stream o f images which are linked only cryptically under the appellation ‘you’ from which we must extract a unifying sense:

ty nepojmenovatelna, jez na nas hledis ocima lanf, oblacku nebo bastami hâjû, pelisku plaché zvefe, ukryte vlastovek, ukryte milencû, ty moje trapeni, zeno ma, mamo ma — tebe jsem nezapfel, tebe jsem nezradil! [...] Vy moje hry, me pisfalky, praku mûj, kaco a kulicky! Ma noci zâzrakû, noci pokladù, noci sjJatebni! [...] pro zavraf tvého rana i soumraku, pro zivou vodu tvych studanek a pramenu, pro tva batolata, pro tvé modlitby, pro tvou pohanu, pro tvou chudobu a pro tvou pfisti slavu! Tobe a jenom tobe jsem vëmÿ! (pp. 155-56)

On the one hand, this ‘you’ appears intangible and yet finds expression in the distant and the hidden; it is there, driving life on — the narrator’s childhood, wedding, the seasons, daybreak and twilight — in a cyclical process, like Dylan Thomas’s force ‘that through the green fuse drives the flower’ and ‘drives the water through the rocks’. The ‘you’ represents also a conception of home which both belongs specifically to Hostovsky’s memory (his sling, his whipping top) and yet represents a home for all mankind. Hostovsky may be trying to evoke the unity of Being from which man has been expelled: the mourning o f loss and the search for enduring truths in Listy concludes in a climactic praise for the mystery of the absolute.

In Sedmkràt, Hostovsky politicizes and makes explicit the intellectual/abstract/betrayal/death and peasant/concrete/constancy/life antinomies which had been latent in Listy. Woman is again a symbol of strength and reintegration with Life. In a novel full of power struggles, Hostovsky posits the artifice o f the deracinated (by birth and by choice) Kavalsky against the simplicity o f his wife. Having just discovered from the doctor that she is pregnant, Kavalska finds herself struggling home through a crowd of people attending a Sokol rally. At first she feels threatened by the mass o f people, likening them to one enormous creature, but, as she collapses to the ground through feeling weak and faint, she is protected with tender concern by some elderly countryfolk; these peasant voices are characterized by their affinity with nature, ‘Ochraptel volanfm na kone, na mraky, na vrany, hlas, jemuz uprostred poll rozumi clovek i ptak i vcela. Hlasu poli odpovidaly hlasy selskych svetnic, vonicich zitnych chlebem’ (p. 191). It is not just Kavalska’s awareness of new life through her pregnancy which restores her

with a long neglected sense o f her own strength, but also her encounter with these countryfolk, who embody a vitality antithetical to her husband’s morbidity, ‘Misto smrti ji kolébâ zivot. [...] Jaky div, nebyla sama, ac nelezela uprostred znamych vëci, nybrz uprostred cizich lidi! Chteli ji pomoci, chteli ji vest a nest’ (p. 192). As she is emboldened by her belief that she can be part of some vital community, she finds the courage (after a long period of silence) to reject her husband and to speak out against him ‘ve jménu zâhadné sily’ (p. 195). Kavalska’s return to the country is described impersonally in the historic present tense through the image o f a woman struggling with a heavy suitcase at a railway station, with the sound of anvils ringing in the distance, ‘Jeste ji vidlm, jeste ji vidim, nasi pani, nasi lasku, nasi zenu — matku a Nadëji’ (p. 218). She is no longer Kavalska, but the personification of stoic patience, the symbolic nationhood as female, the nation’s moral identity metaphorized as maternity. Reflecting again Hostovsky’s portrayal of intellectual/peasant antinomies, Kavalsky’s sister, Lazalova, also returns to the countryside, inspired by her childhood gardener (again, perhaps, led by peasant strength) to join a righteous underground organization operating from caves and consisting

o f workers, maids and students.

In Ükryt, it is a woman who persuades the narrator to sacrifice his life in order to blow up a ship. Having lived in the dark for many months, at first he mistakes her voice for that of a priest’s; he thinks the voice sounds like music he once heard long ago, in the mountains or on the water (emphasizing woman’s connection to another world, a lost paradise). When she informs him o f her true identity, he suddenly recognizes her voice:

Ten hlas, ten hlas! Uz vim! Nalezel me matce. Nalezel tobë, Hanicko, mÿm sestram, mÿm dcerkam! Hltal jsej jej usima, usty a vsemi pory tëla. Kdyz domluvil, polo jsem klecel a polo lezel na zemi. Zdi mého vëzeni zmizely. Byla opët zelena noc dëtstvi. Vonëla pryskyfici a jehlicim. ‘Pojd’!’ septal hlas ze tmy. Hlas chuv, bilych nevëst a andëlû. ‘Pojd’, me ditë, spatfis beranka a svatozaf a Jezulatko. Pojd’, ceka nas prostfeny stûl, pojd’, honem, jsem s tebou, neboj se!’ (p. 127)

The woman’s voice becomes the voice o f all women, perhaps the voice of the one woman, the Virgin Mary as mother, a compassionate agent o f intercession with a higher authority, and mother as the personification o f self-abnegation embracing her prodigal son. The narrator’s proposed sacrifice (he intends to aid the resistance by blowing up a ship with himself aboard it) is paradoxically

a practical act which will restore him to life and redeem him, but only to a life of the spirit.

Hostovsky’s search for meanings beyond the phenomenal loss and chaos of the war, his discovery of a metaphysical unity, must be balanced against his concern with the individual’s role in precipitating disunity. In his earlier fiction Hostovsky was concerned with the causes which precipitated an individual to behave anti-socially or immorally, and enunciated the notion o f a causal chain which went some way towards explaining this kind o f behaviour. Hostovsky develops this notion in his wartime work into an examination o f the collective aberration of the war and the causes behind it. Instead of beginning with the basic principle governing his early work, looking fi*om the outside in — what kind o f transgression has been committed by the world against an individual — Hostovsky reverses this principle and looks from the inside out — at the nature of the individual’s transgression against the world, a relationship which he had begun to examine in his work of the 1930s. Guilt and the responsibility of the individual are therefore at the centre of Hostovsky’s wartime work. A number o f critics have commented on this shift in perspective. Papousek, for example, states that the first-person narration of Hostovsky’s wartime novels constitutes a different mode o f narration to the first person of his earlier work,^® which he attributes to the transformation o f the narrator/protagonist from an unconscious object of the world to a subject conscious of his connection with a transcendental structure and his sense o f responsibility to that structure. Reviewing Listy and Ükryt, Gotz suggests that Hostovsky’s exile has supplied him with the psychological conditions to allow a consummation of his artistic conception, with his prose now assuming a balladic and apocalyptic fever. Gotz comments on the fact that English critics have compared Hostovsky with Kafka,^^ and he discerns as the common element between them ‘zvlâstë ùzkostnÿ pocit hluboké spojitosti individualniho osudu s osudem celého sveta a temnâ baladicka atmosfera, v niz se stiraji hranice casu a prostoru a v niz

30 PapouSek, Clovek v uzavfeném prostoru, p. 105.